The Koreans are an agricultural people, and most of the national industries are connected with agriculture. More than seventy per cent. of the population are farmers; the carpenter, the blacksmith, and the stonemason spring directly from this class, combining a knowledge of the forge or workshop with a life-long experience of husbandry. The schoolmaster is usually the son of a yeoman-farmer; the fisherman owns a small holding which his wife tills while he is fishing. The farming classes participate in certain industries of the country; the wives of the farmers raise the cotton, silk, linen, and grass-cloth of the nation, and they also convert the raw material into the finished fabrics. The sandals, mats, osier and wooden wares which figure so prominently in Korean households, are the work of the farming classes in their leisure moments. The officials, the _yamen_ runners, the merchants, inn-keepers, miners, and junk-men are not of this order, but they are often closely connected with it. The Government exists on the revenue raised from agriculture; the people live upon the fruits of the soil; Korean officials govern whole communities given over to agricultural labour. The internal economy of the country has been affiliated for centuries to the pursuits and problems of agriculture. Koreans are thus instinctively and intuitively agriculturists, and it is necessarily along these lines that the development of the country should in part progress. It is impossible not to be impressed by a force which works so laboriously, while it takes no rest save that variety which comes with the change of season. The peaceable, plodding farmer of Korea has his counterpart in his bull. The Korean peasant and his weary bull are made for one another. Without his ruminating partner, the work would be impracticable. It drags the heavy plough through the deep mud of the rice-fields, and over the rough surface of the grain lands; it carries loads of brick and wood to the market, and hauls the unwieldy market cart along the country roads. The two make a magnificent pair; each is a beast of burden. The brutishness, lack of intelligence, and boorishness of the agricultural labourer in England is not quite reproduced in the Korean. The Korean farmer has of necessity to force himself to be patient. He is content to regard his sphere of utility in this world as one in which man must labour after the fashion of his animals, with no appreciable satisfaction to himself.